Israel's National Security Towards the 21st Century by Uri Bar-Joseph

Author:Uri Bar-Joseph [Bar-Joseph, Uri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9780714681832
Google: FdREHqxBo_QC
Goodreads: 3090200
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2001-01-15T10:23:56+00:00

4. BALANCING KNOWLEDGE CONDITIONS IN INITIAL DESIGNS FOR KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

In sum, the conditions favoring success in redesigning of the whole institution towards an RMA military do not clearly outweigh the conditions working against such success. If the current trends proceed, then the widespread integration of IDF elements has no extant equivalent. Not even the US has implemented its own model. The IDF’s leaders will in effect produce an ‘organizational beta test’ (OBT). This process of using users to test an application began in the computer industry as the complexity of computer applications grew and so did the need for tests of their capabilities under a variety of circumstances. It was too expensive to employ internal staff to just push an application to its limits under many different environments but such levels of complexity in integrated systems cannot be tested to any great level of reliability in advance of implementation either. The name itself comes from the programming community in which the ‘alpha’ or initial test of the new program is done inside the firm developing the program while the second test, the beta test, was pushed outside to these users. Since the next step is to get someone else, preferably a potential user, to spend time pushing the program’s limits, that process became the ‘beta’ test.176

Inadvertently many organizations have performed their own ‘organizational’ beta test (OBT).177 By contracting for in-house programs tailored specifically for their situation or preemptively reorganizing organizational components in order to facilitate computerization, senior leaders have often unwittingly used their organization as a ‘beta’ test of the new program, the new arrangements, or both. As such, the entire organization has to work out the bugs in the process of operating, enduring, and adapting to the inevitable shortfalls between performance and the projections of reality of the program designers or the reorganizers.

According to the amount of organizational slack left in the organization when the network-computerization was implemented, an organizational beta test can be positive, neutral, or deleterious to the organization’s future. Unfortunately for the IDF and any other organization implementing the US-defined RMA military, trading standing forces away to pay the costs of highly synchronized networked computer systems entails slim organizational designs. These structures have little of the slack needed to make the organizational beta test an effective – if expensive – learning experience. When wholesale conversions to new systems are attempted and slack allowing trial and error of the entire future system – humans and their informal operations included – is constrained, the ripple effects of surprises across tightly coupled systems are likely to be the most costly.178 It is a misunderstanding of the dynamic interplay of processes, humans, and artifacts in maintaining essential knowledge slack that has doomed many business process-reengineering efforts. It is a mechanistic focus on artifacts and software that has made enterprise-wide systems prohibitively expensive to implement, maintain and operate successfully without external consultants.179

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.